anthologies – Ink-Stained Wretches

When Disinformation Leads to Death

N.M. Cedeño

Here in Texas over four hundred people have contracted measles in the past few months, resulting in the death of at least one child. Most of these cases were preventable with a vaccine. So why weren’t the victims immunized? Some are infants, too young to be vaccinated. A few may be people with compromised immune systems or other medical conditions that prevent them from receiving vaccines. However, the majority aren’t vaccinated because of conspiracy theories and false information being fed to parents, making them fear the vaccine.

Back in the 1990s, a British doctor, whose medical license was later revoked because of the medical hoax he perpetrated, falsified a study claiming to have identified a causal link between the vaccine for measles, mumps, and rubella, (the MMR vaccine) and autism. He published a massive lie that spread like wildfire and caused vaccination rates in Europe and the United States to plummet. By the time the fraud was revealed, the damage had been done.

As a parent of a child on the autism spectrum, I am absolutely certain the MMR vaccine did not contribute to the condition. I spotted variances in my child’s development by the time he was six months old. I knew something was different about the way he did and did not focus on motion months before he was given his first MMR vaccine. No vaccine caused his neurological differences. The most likely cause is a complex interaction of genetic factors.

Measles and rubella are not diseases that should ever be allowed to spread unchecked. Measles can kill, and when it doesn’t kill, it can obliterate the patient’s immune system, leaving them susceptible to a variety of infections. In countries where vaccination rates for measles are low, children who survive measles frequently die of other illnesses within a short time after having measles. Measles is also one of the most contagious diseases in the world, able to linger on surfaces and in the air for hours after an infected person has left the area.

William Morrow Paperback, reprint edition cover 2004

Rubella, depending on the stage of a woman’s pregnancy when she contracts the disease, can cause blindness, deafness, heart deformities, developmental abnormalities, and death for babies. Many infants only survive a short period after birth due to the damage caused in utero by rubella, also known as German measles. A well-known example of the harm caused by rubella was the case of actress Gene Tierney’s daughter, Daria, which inspired Agatha Christie’s novel The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side.

Growing up, I heard the story of my uncle’s birth from my grandmother more than once. She contracted rubella while pregnant and decided not to go to the doctor for her check up that month because she knew that the doctor would push her to abort. In 1950s America, doctors saw so many deaths of newborns caused by rubella that they frequently advised a mother to abort if she contracted rubella while pregnant.

My grandmother made a choice, believing one should always give life a chance, knowing that her baby might not survive. My uncle was born at around three pounds, his growth and development stunted by the disease. He was deaf in one ear, had heart problems, had very poor vision, and only grew to about five feet tall. But he survived and lived to the age of 70, managing to get a driver’s license, go to community college, and work a variety of jobs.

As a parent, I have met other parents who chose not to vaccinate their kids. That decision, made by otherwise intelligent and educated people, still shocks and disheartens me. Reading that the parents of the child who died from measles still say that they wouldn’t have vaccinated their child scares me. How could they possibly think that the vaccine is somehow worse than the death of their child?

This current measles crisis is yet another example of conspiracy theories and false information being promoted over facts and truth to the detriment of society. Disinformation campaigns, conspiracy theories, and the current general distrust of any authority inspired me to write my latest story, entitled “Murder by Alternate Facts.” In the story a young woman named Arlene stumbles upon a wreck on a lonely country road and is forced to make a choice affecting who lives and who dies. The repercussions of Arlene’s choice inspire conspiracy theories, dividing her hometown and leading to murder.

“Murder by Alternate Facts” appears in the Murderous Ink Press anthology Crimeucopia: Chicka-Chicka Boomba! from editor John Connor.

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N. M. Cedeño is a short story writer and novelist living in Texas. She is active in Sisters in Crime- Heart of Texas Chapter and is a member of the Short Mystery Fiction Society. Find out more at nmcedeno.com.

Thank You, Encyclopedia Brown!

A post by editor and author Michael Bracken over at Sleuthsayers last week made me ponder my writing influences when it comes to detective fiction. Michael, who has read more than his share of detective fiction in the course of his work recently, suggested that authors need to move away from the trope of the “broke, drunk, and horny” private eye if they want to write something that stands out from the pack. He also recommended not always starting the case in the detective’s office because that can lead to too much back story and a severe delay in moving the plot forward. Reading his post, I realized that I’ve never once had the urge to write that stereotypical “broke, drunk, and horny” character. Then, I wondered why I hadn’t.

My first published short story was a detective story. And while my character, a private investigator named Pete Lincoln, was broke, his financial situation had more to do with the times in which he lived than with his own inability to manage funds. His sex life was irrelevant to the case and didn’t come into the story at all. If he drank, it wasn’t to excess, and also didn’t come into the story. Pete lived and worked in a future world in which privacy rights didn’t exist. He appeared in a story entitled “A Reasonable Expectation of Privacy,” which was first published in Analog: Science Fiction and Fact in 2012, and reprinted in Black Cat Weekly #19 in 2022.

Given that most writers, when they first start crafting fiction, write the tropes that they absorbed while reading, I asked myself what detective fiction I had absorbed at an early age that influenced my writing and that didn’t lead me straight to writing the classic stereotype that Michael was lamenting. Who was the first fictional private detective that I read?

And the answer came to me: Encyclopedia Brown, Boy Detective.

While the boy detective did teach me the basics for detective fiction, he wasn’t in financial straits since he was a child who lived a quite middle-class life with his parents. Everyone knew Encyclopedia liked his friend and partner Sally, but that didn’t remotely approach the trope of womanizing detective. As for drunk, no! While some of his cases started in his garage office with a client paying the twenty-five-cent fee, other times Encyclopedia solved cases for his father, the police chief, while sitting at the family dinner table. So the stories also taught me that not all cases had to start in the detective’s office.

By the time I read Sherlock Holmes a few years later, the pattern of how detective fiction worked was already firmly fixed in my head. While Holmes indulged in illicit substances, he also wasn’t a classic “drunk.” Holmes never panicked about paying the bills or complained about being broke. As for women, the only one that counted for anything for Holmes was Irene Adler. So Holmes, another of my early fictional detective influences, didn’t fit the stereotype either.

Since writing my first PI story, I’ve written many other detective stories. While I have started several of them in the detective’s office with the arrival of a client, not one of my detectives has been “drunk, broke, and horny.” For example, Detective Maya Laster is a former middle school teacher who turned a genealogy hobby into a detective business, solving mostly cold cases with the help of forensic genetic genealogy. She has appeared in two stories in Black Cat Weekly (issue #79 and #110) and will be appearing again in an upcoming anthology.

Another of my characters, PI Jerry Milam, came of age during World War II, became a police officer following the war, and suffered terrible injuries in a car wreck which ended his police career, leading him to become a private investigator. He’s a teetotaler with a solid income and chronic left hip pain who feels he missed his chance with women. He appeared in Groovy Gumshoes: Private Eyes in the Psychedelic Sixties and Private Dicks and Disco Balls: Private Eyes in the Dyn-O-Mite Seventies. One of my current works-in-progress sees him solving a case in the 1950s.

If my detectives managed to side-step the cliché of the “broke, drunk, and horny” private investigator, I have my early reading influences to thank for it. So thank you Donald J. Sobol for creating Encyclopedia Brown and teaching me to create private investigators who avoid falling into clichés.

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Goodbye 2024 / Goals 2025

N.M. Cedeño

Between writing, watching a child graduate from high school and leave for college, shepherding another child through obtaining a driver’s license and applying for college, and undergoing unexpected eye surgery, 2024 was a busy year. The year also featured my father’s eightieth birthday party, my twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, and a vehicle totaled in a car accident. Call it the usual assortment of life’s ups and downs.

Last year I set a goal to submit three stories a month. Thanks to my unexpected vision issues and subsequent eye surgery, I didn’t quite hit that goal. I did manage to submit twenty-two unpublished stories and nine previously published stories to various venues for a total of thirty-one submissions.

Seven of the unpublished stories were accepted for publication. Four are still pending either acceptance or rejection. Of the previously published stories that I submitted, seven are still pending and two have been rejected.

Six of my stories were published in 2024. Three appeared in anthologies; two appeared in Black Cat Weekly e-zine; and one appeared on the Redneck Press website. Three short stories and one novella that were accepted for publication in 2024 are pending publication, marching toward their release dates.

These three anthologies containing one of my stories that came out in 2024.

Speaking of that novella. Writing the novella was a challenge and an occasion for learning in 2024. I have a writing process for short stories and another process for novels. I didn’t have a process for the intermediate length. For short stories not requiring research I typically make a few notes and start writing. For full novels I make a few notes and start writing, stop after a few chapters, make more notes, write until I’m two-thirds of the way done with the plot, make revised notes, and then write until I finish the first draft of the book. My process for the novella ended up looking like neither my short story nor my novel processes.

The novella required research, which was difficult to do with one of my eyes seeing double. Writing it was difficult for the same reason. The situation called for flexibility. So, I did something that I don’t normally do. I wrote the story scene by scene by asking myself “what scenes will this story need?” Instead of starting at the beginning, I started writing with a scene I knew I would need.

After writing a few scenes, I made a list of scenes I still needed. Then I went down the list writing the scenes. If I wasn’t sure about how to write a scene, I skipped it and wrote a different scene. Then I went back, figured out the missing scenes, while adding other scenes that I came up with after I made the initial list. Finally, I connected everything. It worked better than I expected. I completed the initial draft in about a month, and finished it with time to spare before the deadline.

Looking forward to 2025, I am setting the same goal of submitting three stories per month. I already have some story deadlines on the calendar, and I’m looking forward to diving into writing them. How many stories will I write? I don’t know, and I’m a bit reluctant to set a goal. However, I do plan to stick with writing short stories with no plans to write a novel.

I plan to attend at least one writing conference in person this year. I have my sights set on Bouchercon New Orleans.

I plan to keep learning from webinars.

I also plan to read more than in 2024, an easy goal, since my reading was severely curtailed by the eye issue.

On the home front, some of 2025 will mirror 2024, with a child graduating from high school and leaving for college. We’re still waiting to find out what college. The main difference from 2024 will be that my last chick will likely fly the nest for the dorms in 2025. We will have a temporarily empty nest until the two youngest chicks return home to the nest during school breaks. Having no children at home will be a huge change in my household routines. I’m sure it will affect my writing patterns and plans in more ways than I can predict.

Here’s looking forward to the new world of 2025!

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Work-Arounds

By N.M. Cedeño

As I type this, I’m seeing double through my right eye. Well, not quite double. On the screen, it’s more like printed letters have their own ghostly echoes lingering directly above and behind. This has been an ongoing issue for over a month due to a dry patch on my cornea, making working on the computer and reading an exhausting slog. My left eye is compensating, allowing me to still have twenty/twenty vision with both eyes open, but I have to take frequent breaks from screens. The eye doctor added a new medicine this past week, so I’m hoping to “see” some improvement soon. If not, the next step is to see a specialist.

I had to come up with a work-around for my current writing project because of the eye-strain. What do you do when reading long articles looking for details that you need for a story makes you tired too quickly? The answer I came up with is “watch videos containing the needed information.”

Because of eye strain, I’ve found watching videos to be easier than reading long articles. With the help of the Sisters in Crime Webinar Archive of videos, I’ve dug into the structure of the FBI, which crimes are under their jurisdiction, and which aren’t, and how cases are assigned and handled. I also watched a webinar on forensics, because why not. The archive contains a wide variety of videos on topics from writing craft to crime-solving. I’ll be watching more videos even when my eye issue is resolved because of the variety of topics and the amount of information available.

Thanks to YouTube videos, I’ve learned how to prevent the theft of a certain model of car, and I’ve learned about what features the car has to prevent the theft of a cargo trailer that the vehicle might be towing. Various videos helped me learn about the particular model of vehicle I need for a story, its security systems, and about the wide world of custom cargo trailers. Now I know how a thief might get around all of those security features to steal both the vehicle and the trailer, which moves the plot on my work-in-progress forward considerably.

Of course, I’m still reading, but far more slowly than usual. I’ve read a couple books by Donna Leon this month and a lot of P.G. Wodehouse. I read the Wodehouse to lighten my mood. Jeeves and Bertie are wonderful if you need to laugh at something utterly ridiculous. I love Bertie’s confusion as Jeeves gets him out of an unwanted engagement by making him appear to be insane. The story where Jeeves and Bertie aid one of Bertie’s friends who has gone to jail for “biffing” a policeman while drunkenly trying to steal the policeman’s helmet left me in stitches.

On the non-writing front, my middle child starts college this month. He will have moved into dorms on campus by the time this blog posts. Thirteen years ago, a neuropsychologist walked me through the challenges he was facing. I realized he had a long road ahead of him and a lot of work to do. Being what’s now called neurodivergent, he would have to fight to learn many things that are innate to the majority of people: everything from proprioception and bilateral coordination to reading facial expressions. And he did ALL of that hard work. He went from being asked to leave a private school in kindergarten and being placed in special education for three years in elementary school to finishing high school in the top 6% of his class.

He is an incredibly talented, intelligent, outgoing young man with a “punny” sense of humor. Watching him leap into a world that has frequently been unkind to him because of his differences is an emotional challenge for a mom. But I believe he will find his way. He knows how to face obstacles, pick himself up and try again when he fails, and persist in chasing his dreams.

On top of that, my youngest earned her driver’s license this summer and has started going out into the world without me driving her. She is embarking on her senior year of high school and filling out college applications.

Watching my kids spread their wings is breathtaking and anxiety-inducing. An empty nest is on the horizon. My empty nest goals include attending a writing convention or two. I’ve only been to Bouchercon once and I’d like to attend again.

Speaking of Bouchercon, the Anthony Boucher World Mystery Convention is this coming weekend. I won’t be attending, so I hope everything goes well for everyone who is traveling to Nashville to attend. If you are there, stop by the book room and pick up a free copy of the anthology Private Dicks and Disco Balls: Private Eyes in the Dyn-O-Mite Seventies edited by Michael Bracken. I have a story in the anthology called “A Woman’s Place.”

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Submissions and Rejections

By N.M. Cedeño

No one likes rejection. Being rejected certainly doesn’t feel good, but anyone who wants to write (and who isn’t self-publishing their work) has to become inured to receiving rejections. While some of my stories have been accepted on their first submission, the vast majority of my traditionally published work was rejected at least once before it was accepted for publication. If I believed that the rejections were commentaries on the quality of the stories, I might have thrown the stories in a drawer after the first rejection and given up. This post is for everyone out there whose fellow writers and beta readers have told them their work is ready for publication, but who are afraid of rejection or think a single rejection is the end of the line.

Sometimes stories (even phenomenal stories that go on to win awards, so I’ve heard) take multiple submissions to find a publication home. These stories, through no fault of the story or the author, simply have trouble landing at the right market with the right editor at the right moment.

If I was the type of person to give up on a story and forget it after one rejection or even after five rejections, several of my stories would never have been published in magazines or anthologies.

Why do some stories take multiple submissions to be accepted if the story is well-written and ready for publication? Mostly, the story has to land in the right niche.

For example, one of my stories, “The Wrong Side of History,” ended up finding a home after ten submissions in After Dinner Conversation, which publishes stories that examine particular ethical questions. The story contains difficult subject matter that some editors won’t touch. I knew the story would be a hard one to place when I wrote it, so I wasn’t surprised when it wasn’t accepted until its tenth submission. Since the story was partially inspired by a paragraph in an article I read in a bioethics textbook, a magazine devoted to advancing ethical discussions was definitely the best place for it. The story can be found in After Dinner Conversation: Season Five.

Another hard-to-place story, “It Came Upon a Midnight Ice Storm,” was a cozy Christmas mystery. It was accepted on its ninth submission. I can find far more markets right now for dark crime fiction than for cozies, let alone Christmas cozies. Trying to figure out the right time to submit a seasonal story for a particular market is also difficult. Happily, I spotted an open call for cozy mysteries from Black Cat Mystery Magazine and found this story a home in issue #12 Cozies.

Other stories just linger on submission. Who knows why.

Recently another story with a long submission history was published. I wrote the first version of “The Ghostly Lady’s Curse” in about 2013, then left it in a file for a while. As near as I can tell, I rewrote a second version of it in 2017 and reviewed the story almost every time I submitted it after that. This was one of those stories that I kept tweaking– a word here, a sentence there, a paragraph added, a paragraph removed– between submissions, as opposed to one that I simply turned around and resubmitted without any changes. While the heart of the story never changed, the details did. On its tenth submission, it finally found a home in the Inkd Publishing anthology Detectives, Sleuths, and Nosy Neighbors.

My ghost story, “A Lonely Death,” which was published in Noncorporeal II from Inkd Publishing, was accepted on its eleventh submission. Among all my stories, this story has the dubious distinction of having the most submissions before being accepted. I changed a word here and there, but after about the third submission, simply resubmitted it. I had a reader tell me recently that they thought this is one of my best stories ever, which is nice to hear!

A glance through my submission records spreadsheet shows I have two other stories with lengthy submission histories. One story that I particularly like and want to see in publication is on its tenth submission. I’m hopeful that it will be accepted soon. But I know it might take some time to find the right market. The story in question contains difficult material, making it doubly hard to place. If it’s not accepted this time around, then maybe it will tie or set a new “number of submissions before publication” record.

If you want to see one of your stories published in a magazine or anthology, and you receive a rejection, DON’T GIVE UP! Don’t dwell on the rejection. Resubmit. Consider rejections as stepping stones to eventual publication.

New Ghost Stories

I started reading ghost stories as a child and enjoyed the chill that the best of them sent up my spine. I began writing ghost stories, with a sci-fi and mystery twist, almost ten years ago when I wrote my first Bad Vibes Removal Services story. The series features Lea, a young history graduate student, working in a new service industry. She sanitizes and neutralizes the lingering emotional history from buildings and homes using newly invented equipment. She was drawn to the job because she’s always been sensitive to emotional atmosphere in rooms and has always been able to see ghosts.

The technology she uses in her job was created by a private detective named Montgomery in his quest to create a device to read the subatomic changes in soft materials caused when sound waves pass through them. Montgomery wanted to be able to read the recordings of conversations held in rooms in order to solve crimes. He ended up being able to track the emotional energy left in walls along with the sounds. In order to put his new technology in the public eye, he started Bad Vibes Removal Services to serve as a sister company to his own Montgomery Investigations business.

Lea, with her team of coworkers, soon discovers that she can’t neutralize the lingering emotions in a house if the source, a ghost in distress, is still present. Many of the ghosts she encounters died under questionable circumstances, leading to murder investigations.

The series started with one story. But I liked the characters so much that I wrote more stories, which led me to write a novel, The Walls Can Talk, then more stories, and another novel, Degrees of Deceit, then, more stories. The series currently has 15 or so published short stories and two novels. The latest story in the series, called “Wedding Vibes,” was published in Black Cat Weekly #145 courtesy of editor Michael Bracken. The story features Lea’s wedding reception being crashed by both a ghost and thieves trying to steal gifts. Luckily, her boss, Montgomery, her coworker and Maid of Honor, Kamika, and the rest of her friends are on the case. The thieves chose the wrong reception to crash.

Another one of my ghost stories is rolling out right now, too. “A Lonely Death” is coming out in an anthology of spooky stories from Inkd Publishing called Noncorporeal II. Those who ordered the anthology from the Kickstarter should be receiving their copies shortly, and it will go on sale to the general public soon. The story begins with a cowboy digging a grave in the “middle of nowhere Texas” in the mid 1800s. Soon there after, a little boy whose home was built in what once was the “middle of nowhere Texas” meets a ghost. This story is told from the point of view of the ghost and from the point of view of the people in whose home the ghost appears.

This story was inspired by a three-year-old who was seen in his home talking to and looking up at an adult who the child’s mother couldn’t see. The family had several guests report either seeing a man who vanished or feeling “creeped out” in their guest room. The house was brand new, built on what had been farmland in Central Texas. My story answers the question of why a brand new house might have a ghost.

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Researching the 1970s for “A Woman’s Place”

By N.M. Cedeño

The 1970s! Disco! Abba! The Eagles! Richard Nixon. The end of the Vietnam War. Women’s Rights. And, umm, yeah, other stuff. I was born mid-decade and have no real memories of the 1970s. Writing about the 1970s, for me, isn’t a matter of “write what you know,” but rather one of “research what you need to know.”

When editor Michael Bracken asked me to submit a story for the Private Dicks and Disco Balls: Private Eyes in the Dyn-O-Mite Seventies (Down & Out Books, May 2024) I read the requirements, which specified including some historical event from the 1970s, and knew I would have to dive into research.

I began searching for events of the 1970s with the help of the internet and my local library card. Logging into my local library online gave me access a plethora of research material, including the archives for Time Magazine (1923-2000), Life Magazine (1936-2000), one hundred years of The Austin American Statesman (1871-1980), and access to Newspapers.com for free. I skimmed or read news articles from major newspapers covering crime, disasters, and political issues of the 1970s. Women’s rights issues, including Title IX, employment protections, and the attempts to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, recurred in my search, leading me to the event I needed for the story: the Battle of the Sexes tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs. The Battle of the Sexes took place in Houston in September 1973.

I even found video from the era, including video from the tennis match itself. Archived videos are fabulous research resources. I discovered news broadcasts from Houston during the 1970s and watched several segments. The benefit of video in research for writing can’t be overstated. Watching news broadcasts provided glimpses of linguistic quirks, clothing styles, hair styles, technology, and automobiles of the 1970s. The insane way (by today’s standards) in which reporters wandered into crime scenes, shoved microphones into the face of working doctors in hospitals, and even sickened themselves while reporting on chemical disasters fed into my understanding of the decade. If a reporter could get away with that much, a private investigator could do that and more.

My research uncovered regulations on who could and couldn’t be a police officer, leading me to articles explaining how, for decades, the height requirement for the Houston Police Department eliminated all the Hispanics who applied for the police academy. The height requirement was changed in the early 1970s to allow for greater diversity in the department. I learned how women’s roles in police departments were limited and about efforts to remove those limits. This research helped in the creation of one of my secondary characters for the story: a petite, Hispanic woman with quashed aspirations for law enforcement.

In researching fires and industrial accidents, I found articles on hazardous materials being routed through Houston and the dangers they posed. I read calls for the creation of hazardous material routes around big cities. Then I reached out to an expert with knowledge of industrial explosives from the 1970s to 2000s. My father worked as an insurance underwriter for a special risk program that included insuring businesses that manufactured, distributed, or used things that go “BOOM.” He had to learn a lot about explosives. He was, and is, a fount of information.

As I worked, I learned more than I needed for my story, and the research began to coalesce into a plot involving my detective, Jerry Milam, in an arson investigation that led him from Austin to Houston during the week of the Battle of the Sexes tennis match. Jerry Milam previously appeared in Groovy Gumshoes: Private Eyes of the Psychedelic Sixties, (Down & Out Books, 2022, edited by Michael Bracken) in a story entitled “Nice Girls Don’t.”

They say “write what you know,” but the caveat to that is “learn what you need to know.” I researched what I didn’t know and I melded it with what I already knew. I was already familiar with my setting in Houston, although I did consult a few maps. Describing Houston is easy for someone who was born there and visits the city regularly. Also, tucked into the story are details that I know because I have an affinity for trivia, including details that my PI would have known: like who was Red Adair (hint: John Wayne played a version of him in The Hellfighters) and what happened in Texas City in 1947 (hint: worst industrial accident in US History).

My local library online research resources are phenomenal and are my favorite place to browse when I need very specific historical information. Reaching out to experts is also beneficial for getting the nitty-gritty details right. Do you have favorite research sites? Where do you look when you need accurate information quickly?

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The Derringer Awards and Reading for Writing

By N.M. Cedeño

They say to be a writer you must first be a reader. And it’s true. So reading is both necessary for my work and my favorite form of leisure activity. I’m lucky that I get to do something I enjoy and would do anyway in support of my work.

I’ve never kept lists or used programs to track what I read. It never felt necessary. As a result, I can’t cite definitive numbers about how much I read or analyze by category what I read. In general, I enjoy mystery novels, mainly historical and traditional, some cozy, very rarely thrillers. I read the occasional historical romance novel and frequently read nonfiction histories. When I see a topic that piques my interest, I’ll even read books on bioethics, philosophy, medical matters, and even economics. And, of course, I read tons of short stories in magazines, e-zines, anthologies, and collections. Most of the short stories are crime fiction, but science fiction short stories creep in here and there, too.

In the last few years, I’ve been writing short stories exclusively. Reading the short stories that are being published helps me learn which markets print what kind of stories. In this past week alone, I read twenty-three short stories and two novels. Setting the novels aside, let’s focus on those twenty-three short stories. You might have noticed that’s an oddly specific number for someone who doesn’t write down or track what she reads.

I have an excellent reason for knowing that number.

We are in the midst of Derringer Award season, during which Short Mystery Fiction Society members vote on which stories receive the Derringer Award for Short Mystery Fiction. The stories are nominated in four categories: flash fiction, short story, long story, and novelette. On April 1, the nominees for each category were announced on the Short Mystery Fiction Society blog page. As a member of the Short Mystery Fiction Society it is my duty and privilege to read all of the nominated short stories and vote on which stories I believe should win an award. Once the nominees were posted, I read them, all twenty-three nominees, which is how I know exactly how many short stories I read this past week. The stories were phenomenal, the best of the best in short crime fiction.

Many of these stories are what I aspire to write: powerful, thought-provoking, well-plotted, well-written short crime fiction. These stories are examples of the best work being done in the short mystery genre in various lengths, from under 1000 words to under 20,000 words. I encourage anyone who wants to write short mystery fiction to seek out the stories, and past winners, and read them. They are more than worth your time, and you will learn a lot about great writing from them.

And about those novels I read this week? They were from the Holmes on the Range series by Steve Hockensmith. I discovered the series by reading the related short stories in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. The most recent story was in the January/February 2024 issue, and the blurb with the story helpfully informed me that earlier stories I may have missed had been rereleased recently. Thanks to that helpful blurb, I went looking for the novels and found them. Next, I’ll be hunting down the short stories that I missed.

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The Ghostly Lady’s Curse and Kickstarter

By N.M. Cedeño

As I have written in other blog posts, I am fortunate in that I have access to a great deal of my family history, thanks mostly to my father, the family genealogist. I am lucky that relatives collected stories, wrote them down, and then passed them down. And because of long life spans and long generations, I can reach back to the 1860s via only a few people on multiple lines in my family tree.

This brings me to a show I enjoy, Finding Your Roots on PBS. In the show, various celebrity guests sit down with the host to learn about their genealogy and family history.

If I sat down in front of the host of the show, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., he’d have to dig deep into my family tree to surprise me. After telling some crazy family story, Gates always asks his guests, “Have you ever heard that story?” In most of the episodes of the show, the answer is “no.” Stories from family history get lost and forgotten all the time. People fail to pass them down.

This brings me to my story entitled “The Ghostly Lady’s Curse.”

The main character in “The Ghostly Lady’s Curse” is a homicide detective named Tina Jones, who didn’t know her father’s family history because her father never discussed it. Tina never heard anything about the small Texas town where her great-grandparents lived. Until a series of events drew her father back to that town, Tina didn’t know that her great-grandparents’ house was considered to be cursed by a ghost because so many family members died suddenly over the decades. Like most of the people interviewed by Henry Louis Gates on PBS, Tina is surprised by the stories that no one bothered to tell her.

“The Ghostly Lady’s Curse” is set in a fictional Hill Country Texas town somewhere near Enchanted Rock State Natural Area. The Hill Country in central Texas is a beautiful, but sometimes forbidding area of the state. At Enchanted Rock Natural Area, an uprising of igneous rock from the earth’s crust forms a pink granite batholith that has been smoothed into domes, weathered by the elements over time. Like my character Tina Jones, I’ve enjoyed many hikes at Enchanted Rock over the years. It’s a beautiful and popular park for hiking and camping, especially in the spring and fall when the temperature isn’t dangerously hot.

“The Ghostly Lady’s Curse” is coming out this year in an anthology from Inkd Publishing edited by A. Balsamo called Detectives, Sleuths, and Nosy Neighbors. Right now, the story is on pre-order via a Kickstarter until March 8, 2024. If you’d like to support the production of the book and pre-order an e-book, print book, or audio book, check out the Kickstarter.

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A New Story Coming Soon and Updates

By N.M. Cedeño

I have a couple stories pending publication right now. One of the publishers revealed an author list and book cover this month.

My story “The Ghostly Lady’s Curse” is scheduled to be published in an anthology entitled Detectives, Sleuths, and Nosy Neighbors from Inkd Publishing. The publisher announced the author line-up for the anthology this month. You can see the announcement here.

I am pleased to see “The Ghostly Lady’s Curse” published. It’s one of those pieces that languished on the computer, ignored for years, after I first wrote it in 2013. I rewrote a second version of it in 2017, and I’ve updated it a few times since. This story is an example of how publishing a short story can be a matter of persistence in the search for the right market with the right editor at the right moment. “The Ghostly Lady’s Curse” was submitted to ten other markets before editor A. Balsamo selected it for inclusion in this upcoming anthology. I’ll write more about this story, and it’s inspiration when the publication date approaches. In the meantime, here’s what the cover is going to look like.

A glance through my submission records spreadsheet shows I have two other stories with at least ten previous submissions, still looking for homes. One story has two strikes against it– a word count that is higher than most markets prefer and difficult subject matter– making it very difficult to place. The other is a niche story: part western, part ghost story. I’m keeping my eyes open for markets for them. I could always self-publish them in collections, if I had enough similarly-themed stories to make collections. That can be a future project if the right markets don’t appear…

As I mentioned in previous blogs, my house was bombarded by baseball to softball sized hail last September. The damage was substantial. I had hoped that all the repairs would be completed before the new year started. Of course, we aren’t finished yet. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel though. The final repairs have been scheduled.

I’ve been down the research rabbit hole this week, diving into background material for a new story, so I only wrote a few thousand words. However, I did write the first draft of a 7000 word short story last week. That story needs editing and trimming before I ship it off somewhere.

I hope your January went well.

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